Anil Varanasi, Co-Founder and CEO of Meter, sat down with VMblog to discuss the future of enterprise networking at the company’s annual MeterUp event in San Francisco. The discussion comes at a pivotal moment for the networking industry, as enterprises grapple with increasing connectivity demands while facing a shortage of skilled network engineers. Varanasi outlined Meter’s vision for autonomous networks that don’t replace human expertise, but rather amplify itenabling engineers to work more efficiently through purpose-built AI and a fully integrated networking stack.
During the conversation, Varanasi addressed the growing wave of AI announcements in the networking space, distinguishing between genuine innovation and what he calls “AI washing.” He highlighted why Meter’s approach differs from competitors, from its vertically integrated architecture and custom-trained Command AI model to new hardware platforms and a groundbreaking partnership with Lumen Technologies. The interview covers the company’s latest announcements, its perspective on the current state of AI in networking, and how Meter believes the autonomous network market will evolve in the coming years.
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VMblog: Before we get started, can you give VMblog readers some quick background on Meter and what sets it apart from other enterprise network vendors?
Anil Varanasi: Meter is a networking company. We’ve built the full networking stack from the ground up into a single, integrated solution that is delivered as a service to our customers for a predictable monthly fee. That includes ISP procurement, security, routing, switching, wireless, firewall, cellular, power, DNS security, VPN, SD-WAN, and multi-site workflows.
The Meter stack represents a significant shift from the legacy networks that exist today, many of which were assembled through acquisitions and layers of products rather than designed as one system. Our stack is built, not bought.
Today, some of the largest companies and enduring institutions rely on us to keep their thousands of employees and locations online and productive. Meter is headquartered in San Francisco and backed by leading venture capital firms, investors, and founders.
VMblog: Meter held its MeterUp event this week in San Francisco. What’s happening at the show?
Varanasi: Yes, we’re really excited to welcome our community to San Francisco for MeterUp. In addition to sharing the latest Meter updates, we had some incredible speakers join us, including Satya Nadella, Kate Johnson, the CEO of Lumen, Sanjit Biswas, co-founder of Meraki, and Bob Metcalfe, who invented Ethernet.
We covered a lot.
The team unveiled our vision for autonomous networks, which represents a shift in how enterprise networks will be designed, configured, and managed, moving from reactive to proactive systems. Autonomous networks start with a strong foundation. Ours comes from our vertically integrated architecture and our generative AI product Command, which we unveiled last year. At the event, we showed how autonomy is already taking shape with new Support and Operations integrations. In Support, Command analyzes real-time telemetry to guide troubleshooting and resolution. And in Operations, it now automates end-to-end network design and configuration, enabling faster, consistent deployments that improve continuously through operator feedback.
We also unveiled nine new hardware platforms, all designed, built, and tested by Meter to deliver enterprise-grade reliability, performance, and security. Each platform reflects our belief that better hardware leads to better software, and that both must be designed together to scale from 1G to 1TB. The platforms include a mix of Wi-Fi 7 access points, firewalls, switches, and an external 5G gateway. Collectively, this portfolio will provide 3x higher throughput than legacy options, as well as 2-3x faster installation and provisioning due to its zero-touch design. All Meter customers will be upgraded to the latest generation hardware by early 2026 at no additional cost. Only Meter can offer this type of seamless upgrade path with our monthly service model.
Lastly, we announced a new partnership with network WAN provider Lumen Technologies.
VMblog: What makes your agreement with Lumen unique? And why has no one done this before?
Varanasi: We partnered with Lumen to simplify enterprise connectivity. By combining the best of both platforms, Lumen’s high-performance WAN and Meter’s intelligent LAN platform, we’re providing an end-to-end networking experience. In a single procurement flow in Meter Connect, companies can purchase the integrated WAN-to-LAN solution, gaining faster deployment, unified visibility, and lower total cost of ownership. It will also be available on the Microsoft Marketplace.
The reason this has not been done before is simple. It requires a fully integrated network stack that’s built from the ground up and delivered as a service. We are the only company that has achieved this model in production.
VMblog: Not a day goes by that someone announces some new way to leverage AI for networking and connectivity. From your perspective, how much of this is real and how much is “AI washing?”
Varanasi: There are a lot of bold claims being made around AI features in the industry today. I think a lot of it is largely a marketing play. It’s hard to determine what’s substantive and what’s not.
When models are purpose-built for a specific domain, they can be really powerful. We see this with our product Command. It’s a small model that is trained on our backend to deeply understand a Meter network. With Command, users can visualize information, build dashboards pulling real-time data, and execute configuration changes on the fly using natural language. This is the power of a purpose-built model. Much of the industry relies on generic calls to foundation models, but we don’t believe that’s how you build reliable models that you can trust in production.
VMblog: You’ve talked a lot about autonomous networks. How do you see this market evolution unfolding?
Varanasi: I think it will resemble the progression of other autonomous systems, like cars.
If you look at the industry today, the need for autonomous networks becomes clear. Network demand is growing quickly, but workforce growth is flat. Without enough skilled engineers, we risk misconfigurations and overlooked design flaws that can lead to security vulnerabilities.
We can’t manufacture thousands of new engineers overnight, but we can build systems that help engineers do more. The goal is not to replace them, but to support them with tools that accelerate design, deployment, and maintenance, improve reliability and performance, and give them more time to focus on higher level work.
The companies that win will be the ones that build automation that amplifies network engineers. That starts with control of the full stack, large datasets, and scalable compute. This is the architecture Meter has been building for the past decade.
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Anil Varanasi is the Co-Founder and CEO of Meter, a networking company that builds internet infrastructure. Anil and his brother Sunil started Meter in 2015 with the goal of making it easy for organizations to get great internet, networking, and Wi-Fi. Today, tens of millions of square feet are powered by Meter. Enterprises like Bridgewater, Reddit, Lyft, and Stord rely on Meter to provide critical infrastructure and connectivity for their businesses.
